Pride & Passion. Charlotte Featherstone

certainly would have given the marquis some much needed grief.

      “Alas, I am only a poor helpless female, concerned only with fashion and fiction. Speaking of that—Lady Lucy and Lady Black are due here any moment. They’re bringing the new penny dreadfuls.”

      Adrian hid his groan. Lucy in his house. He could hardly bear it. But he would, for Elizabeth’s sake. She had very few real friends, and he would never think to deprive her of Isabella and Lucy’s companionship.

      “Now, you know that I don’t condone this … this snooping about, but should I question Lucy about anything?”

      Elizabeth could not see the surprise on his face, but she sensed it.

      “You didn’t think I knew, did you? Adrian, really, she’s my friend. And you’re my brother. I want to help you find the man responsible for stealing the pendant and murdering Mr. Knighton. I want also to keep Lucy out of danger, if indeed she is in danger.”

      “She is,” he growled, “believe me, she is.” He thought of the murderer who had been carrying Lucy’s handkerchief. What the devil had she been about giving a man such as that any token of her affection? A strange sense of betrayal filtered through his blood but he shook it off, determined to try to think of other things.

      “Why don’t you tell me what it is, so that I may aid both of you?”

      He’d kept the secret well-guarded, deep in his heart. It haunted him at night, and he wanted to be purged of it, to forget he had ever discovered it. But was telling his sister the thing to do? Was it betraying Lucy?

      “Adrian?” she asked. “There is no need to war with yourself over this. I just thought, well, sometimes secrets are a burden when one must shoulder them alone.”

      Suddenly he was speaking, not thinking it through, only knowing he needed this, the ability to talk to another soul who might have some wisdom to impart to him.

      “The man who shot Knighton,” he began, recalling the scene a few weeks ago when the pendant, one of the relics the Brethren Guardians were responsible for keeping, went missing, and Isabella’s—now Lady Black’s—former suitor, Knighton, had been found with it. “He was involved with Orpheus. Hell, he might even be Orpheus.”

      Orpheus was a rogue Freemason. Adrian was certain. This Orpheus had an uncanny knowledge of the Brethren Guardians. Their existence was a secret. No one but the three of them and their families knew of it. No one knew that the relics they protected even existed. But Orpheus knew. And so had Wendell Knighton. The urge to find and unmask this Orpheus positively seethed and festered inside him. It should have been because of his oath—the liege he owed to the generations of his family who had successfully kept the chalice and the secret of the Brethren Guardians carefully hidden. But it was not. It was the knowledge that Lucy was intimately acquainted with the bastard that ate at him, made him want to discover Orpheus’s identity, and tear at him—destroy him. For what, he had asked himself? And the answer was always there, whispering in his mind. For taking the woman he loved, for turning her away so that she could not see him, or his need; for making her unable to accept anything he offered her.

      “You’re woolgathering again, brother,” Lizzy murmured. The touch of her fingers pulled him out of his reverie and escalating anger, and helplessness that had been his constant companion these past weeks.

      “This man who shot Knighton, he obviously didn’t want us to capture Knighton alive. Before he shot him, I spotted him on the roof of the lodge. I ran to the back of the building and gave chase, but he had quite a head start on me, and when he was out of sight, I stopped, deciding it prudent to return to Black who had been shot. And then I saw it. A lace handkerchief, with three initials.”

      The memory made his stomach fall to his feet, just as it had when he’d picked up the lace and saw what he held.

      “Lucy Ashton’s initials, I presume.”

      “Yes.”

      “I think I know the rest. She had given this man her favor—and he is the lover that she’s trying to connect with on the other side, via all the séances and soothsayers she’s been visiting.”

      Adrian could no longer deny the truth to himself. “She loves him,” he said on a breath that he knew sounded pained. “She believed him dead, and when I gave her back the handkerchief, it told her that he was indeed very much alive and not killed in the fire as she had assumed. She doesn’t seem to give a damn that he’s a murderer, and my enemy, and also the enemy of her cousin’s husband. She’s obsessed with finding him,” he snapped. Lunging up from the settee, he paced the room like a caged lion.

      “She’s determined to find him, even knowing that we search for him. She’s resolved to stand in our way, and if it makes her an enemy of us, so be it.”

      “Then we must protect her for her own good.”

      “How? She won’t do or say anything that might help us.”

      Rising, Elizabeth held out her hand, and he grasped it, steadying her. “She won’t tell you, brother, but she’ll confide in a friend—I am sure of it. Now, I hear a carriage … that will be them. Take yourself off, Adrian. Your expression, I’m quite certain, is rather ferocious. It will hardly induce poor Lucy to share her confidences with me.”

      He stood there, stunned. “You would do that?”

      “Betray Lucy’s confidence?” She shrugged, and reached down to where Rosie, now off the settee, placed her head against Elizabeth. “Only so far as it might help you. Anything she says that is of no consequence to this case, or Orpheus, I will not share. I like her, Adrian. And I could not live with myself if she were to be hurt by this man.”

      “Thank you, Lizzy.”

      “There is no need to thank me, yet. I haven’t gotten her to confide in me—and I won’t if you’re standing around.”

      “All right,” he said, kissing her on the cheek. “I’ll head out to Blake’s. I’m meeting Black and Alynwick there.”

      “A good idea. Be back for tea and I shall share what I learn.”

       CHAPTER THREE

      IF IT WASN’T for Elizabeth’s excellent conversation and friendship, Lucy wouldn’t dare step foot inside the huge town house. Despite its size, there was every possibility she might very well run into the duke—whom she was presently arduously avoiding.

      “Ah, good day, ladies,” Elizabeth said as she breezed into the foyer with the help of a footman, her pet spaniel at her side. “You have brought the contraband, I hope?”

      Isabella held up a stack of leaflets. “The penny dreadfuls. Hot off the press. I made Black run out early this morning to get them.”

      “How fortunate for us that you have the ability to persuade your reclusive husband to leave his home, and at so early an hour.”

      “There are some inducements his lordship is unable to resist,” Isabella murmured. Laughter filled the entry, and the footman struggled to hide a crooked smile.

      “Well, my brother has gone to see Lord Black, so we have the house to ourselves. We may eat as many scones as we like, and drink pots of tea, without any tedious male intrusion.”

      Lucy let out a sigh of relief. While she had been looking forward to visiting Elizabeth, she dreaded the thought of running into the duke. To know the house was devoid of him was something more than a sense of relief. It was gratitude.

      “Come. I’ve decided to use the yellow salon in the hopes it might make the day brighter. I’ve been told it’s cold and dreary, and quite dull outside.”

      It was. And Lucy despised it. Too many days and nights she passed by herself in weather such as this. Since Issy had married Black and moved out of the house they had once shared with Lucy’s father, Lucy had found herself